F eminism

&
Article
Psychology
Feminism & Psychology
2019, Vol. 29(1) 3–18
The gendered nature ! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
of self-help sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0959353519826162
journals.sagepub.com/home/fap
Sarah Riley
Aberystwyth University, UK

Adrienne Evans
Coventry University, UK

Emma Anderson
University of Brighton, UK

Martine Robson
Aberystwyth University, UK

Abstract
Self-help promises the chance of being ‘‘better’’. Across multifarious platforms, including
books, apps and television shows, it offers hope that we can be our own agents of change
for a happier life. Critical research troubles this premise, arguing that the recurring trope
of the individualistic ideal-self found in self-help literature is at the expense of seeking
solutions in collective, feminist, or otherwise politicised activism. Self-help is also prob-
lematically gendered, since women are often positioned as particularly in need of
improvement, an understanding further intensified by postfeminist sensibility. These
issues are examined conceptually before introducing 10 articles on self-help published
in Feminism & Psychology across three decades and brought together as a Virtual Special
Issue to offer a significant body of work for scholars and students alike.

Keywords
self-help, individualism, postfeminism, transformation, psy-complex, health

Self-help offers us the promise of being ‘‘better’’. Better people with fewer character
flaws, or with more desired characteristics, such as charisma, confidence or self-assur-
ance (e.g. Kay & Shipman, 2014; McKenna, 2016). Better at work, if we develop skills
in persuasion, learn to ‘‘lean in’’, or ‘‘dress to impress’’ (e.g. Rothman, 2013; Sandberg,
2013). Better at eating (Beck & Beck Busis, 2015), better at managing relationships

Corresponding author:
Sarah Riley, Department of Psychology, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, SY23 3UX, UK.
Email: scr2@aber.ac.uk
4 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

(Birch, 2018), or even better at tidying our houses (Kondo, 2014). The allure of self-
help is the possibility of being better, with the help of psychological expert advice.
Today, people have unprecedented access to such expert advice. The self-help
industry is worth billions,1 and self-help is offered through many mediums,
including a huge range of self-help books and digital technologies. For example,
a non-exhaustive search for ‘‘self-help’’ in Apple’s app store brought up guided
meditation and hypnosis for issues such as anxiety, insomnia, self-esteem; apps
providing daily affirmations and mantras; tools for personal growth based on a
range of psychological approaches; and ways to enhance fitness or sleep based on
self-tracking practices. In all of these, there is a hopeful message that people can be
their own agents of change to obtain a better, healthier, happier life.
Yet critical perspectives on self-help literature question this message. We intro-
duce here a Virtual Special Issue (available on the Feminism & Psychology website),
in which we have brought together a set of articles published in Feminism &
Psychology that inform this scholarship. To contextualise this work, we discuss
important contributions on self-help from diverse literatures that sit within and
outside of psychology. In our discussion, we analyse the way critical scholars of
self-help literature identify the recurring trope of an individualist ideal self.
The similarity of vision from a range of different psychological frameworks
points to a shared underlying ideology of individualism that, while couched in
the psychological language of self-actualisation, directs desires towards becoming
ideal subjects for late capitalist economies.
We follow this discussion with an analysis of the gendered nature of self-help
literature, whereby women are often positioned as particularly in need of help to
become this ideal individualist self. Developing this gendered analysis, we discuss
research on postfeminist sensibility, which troubles representations of women as
flawed, yet able to fix themselves through work on the self. Throughout, we high-
light a key theme within the critical literature on self-help, namely, that the focus
on the individual is at the expense of the social, reducing the possibility of seeking
solutions in collective feminist activism. We then introduce the 10 articles that
make up the Virtual Special Issue on self-help, before suggesting future directions
for fruitful feminist scholarship in this area.

Ideal individualism
Self-help draws on a range of psychological frameworks. These include cognitive
behavioural therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, acceptance and commitment
therapy, evolutionary psychology, and even neuropsychology. For example, if we
experience anxiety, we might practise mindfulness, which links itself to Buddhist
philosophy; alternatively, we might undergo hypnosis, with the belief in a deeply
rooted subconscious; or engage in activities organised around cognitive therapy,
which offer practices that aim to restructure our thought patterns.
Psychoanalysis, in particular, provides many concepts central to self-help,
especially in the idea that early life experiences shape later life (Illouz, 2008).
These assumptions are in, for example, the bestselling Women Who Love Too
Riley et al. 5

Much (Norwood, 1985), where a woman’s early-life familial experiences could lead
to her being an obsessive partner and addicted to destructive relationships, putting
herself at risk of self-harm and suicide.
Psychoanalytic accounts can be contrasted with those that draw on positive
psychology, another important framework underpinning self-help literature.
Positive psychology is often historically understood as emerging from 1970s hippy
culture, although it has historical precursors in the New Thought and Mental
Hygiene movements of the 19th and early 20th century (Becker & Marecek, 2008).
Academically legitimated since the late 1990s by the claims of Seligman and
Csikszentmihalyi (2000) among others, positive psychology represents a shift away
from the ‘‘negative’’ concerns of traditional psychology and instead proposes that
happiness, resilience and ‘‘positive’’ emotions can be consciously worked on and
increased. In so doing, positive psychology does not ‘‘seek to ‘fight against’ negative
past experiences, but to fight against the idea that there is something we have to fight
against’’ (De La Fabián & Stecher, 2017, p. 613). But in giving up the ‘‘fight against’’,
such perspectives within self-help minimise structural inequalities and refute collect-
ive resistance against such inequality. Such an apolitical approach was encapsulated
by the hugely popular The Secret (Byrne, 2006), a self-help book and video which
asserted that thinking positively was all that was needed to transform the self and
attract a life of success and power.
Different psychological frameworks in the self-help literature appear to sug-
gest different routes to happiness. Yet despite their apparent differences, most
share a similar vision of a flawed individual whose route to a better life rests on
developing greater self-mastery over their thoughts and/or behaviours. To
achieve this, self-help authors construct the self as ‘‘ontologically separate from
itself’’ (Hazleden, 2003, emphasis in original, p. 416), and it is the reader’s rela-
tionship with, and responsibility to, the self that becomes their main ethical
obligation.
The ideal self in self-help literature is therefore a self-focused, highly individua-
lised subject who works on themselves––often at the exclusion of the social.
For example, Twenge and Campbell (2009) accuse self-help literature of creating
narcissistic cultures of self-serving inward-looking individuals: ‘‘In place of love for
another person, put love for the self; in place of caring, put exploitation; and to
commitment, add ‘as long as it benefits me’’’ (p. 213, also see Lasch, 1979, and
Furedi, 2004, for similar accusations of narcissism). Twenge and Campbell’s argu-
ments problematically ignore the gendered way that complaints of narcissism may
be more easily directed at women who are culturally expected to put others’ needs
before their own (Illouz, 2008; Tyler, 2006). However, they share with a range
of critical literature on self-help a concern that the psychological discourses of
self-actualisation and self-improvement focus on people changing themselves,
rather than their social or political context.
Self-help is criticised for taking attention away from questioning the social con-
text that might make a person want to transform the self. Contexts that are effect-
ively obscured include inequalities structured around gender, race, class and
sexuality; precarious working practices and tentative life narratives; and global
6 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

geo-political uncertainty and its attendant risks and fear (Bauman, 2000; Beck,
2000; Illouz, 2008).
The individualistic psychological focus of self-help literature can work to legit-
imise the status quo at an institutional as well as ideological level. For example,
Richard Layard, a prominent UK happiness expert and government advisor, wrote
in Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2011, pp. 199–200):

So how can public policy help? As we have seen, our happiness depends profoundly on
our attitudes, and these can be learned and practised. Unless you acquire good atti-
tudes early, you get into situations where it is ever more difficult to learn them.

In this account, adverse situations happen as a result of not practising the right
attitudes, rather than being a potential cause of unhappiness, allowing Layard to
discuss societal influences on happiness, without framing these as a sensible area to
work on. Instead, ‘‘education of the spirit’’ (2011, p. 200) is suggested as a gov-
ernment priority. In this way, self-help works to construct thoughts and feelings as
modifiable, but the wider world as fixed and unchangeable (Anderson, 2017).
‘‘Education of the spirit’’ is needed because the self addressed by self-help
literature is a flawed individual. To seek self-help is to understand oneself as
dis-preferred in some way – in need of fixing. Self-help is thus predicated on the
idea that ‘‘normal’’ psychological functioning is flawed, understanding people
‘‘through a prism of illness’’ (Brunila & Siivonen, 2014, p. 61). As Illouz (2008,
p. 176) argues, ‘‘the very injunction to strive for higher levels of health and
self-realization produces narratives of suffering’’ (emphasis in original). The work
of transformation is therefore never done; there are relapses and new areas to
improve, so that self-actualisation through transformative self-help remains an
elusive goal. As a Norwegian women’s magazine succinctly put it, ‘‘we can all be
better’’ (cited in Madsen & Ytre-Arne, 2012, p. 25).
Another concern with the ideal self in self-help literature is the use of psycho-
logical language. Psychological language is needed for individuals to ‘‘look into’’
their selves, in order to name and change their thought processes as part of the
process of living a better life. But sociologist Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999) argues that
such psychological discourse is a key site of the reproduction of power rather than
of freedom through self-actualisation.
For Rose (1996), psychology gives us a language with which to make sense of
the self, within which is the injunction to understand ourselves as free, agentic and
choosing. This creates a paradox, since we must be both freely choosing and choose
to work on the self in order to live a better life. The resulting subjects are those who
use psychological language to make sense of and better understand themselves.
But this is an ‘‘obligated freedom’’; individuals are required to work on themselves
if they are to be understood as a good person (Rose, 1999). If they fail to work on
themselves, or if this work fails to bring about the desired betterment, the psycho-
logical discourse locates this failure within the individual (Rimke, 2000). This cre-
ates a context of guilt, shame and blame, where there is both an unforgiving
obligation to work on the self and little obligation to help others, since they are
Riley et al. 7

held personally responsible for what once might have been considered bad fortune
or the outcome of poor government policies.
Being able to use psychological language to reflect on the self is also a core
requirement for neoliberal subjectivity. Neoliberal market-led economies require
their citizens to be psychologically flexible in order to meet the needs of fluctuating
economies (Kelly, 2006; Hall, 2011; Rose & Miller, 1992). Self-help, with its provi-
sion of tools to facilitate a reflexive individual, is thus a technology of self, providing
tools for people to work on themselves in order to produce themselves in line with
wider, culturally valued notions of a good self (De Vos, 2015; Evans & Riley, 2014;
Foucault, 1988, 2008; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2018; Rose, 1999). Indeed, the bond
between self-help and market economies can be seen in the dominance of economic
language within self-help, which includes thinking about the self as an ‘‘investment’’,
being more ‘‘efficient’’ (with its implications of value for money), and other monetary
metaphors (see Frith, 2015; Gill, 2009; Gregg, 2018; Hochschild, 2012).
Analysis that ties together self-help, psychological discourse and neoliberal
forms of capitalism allows us to see how ‘‘the ideals and aspirations of individuals,
with the selves each of us want to be, are aligned with wider authorities’’ (Rose,
1999, p. 213). Such work suggests that we should be suspicious about self-help, or
at least recognise that a very particular vision of happiness is being offered that
opens up some possibilities while closing down others. From this standpoint, it is
important to ask: what is being closed down and to what effect?
Rose’s work also helps us to consider how constructions of the individualised
ideal self circulate across a range of self-help texts, organisations and associated
people, which Foucault (1977) called the dispositif (a range of semi-autonomous
institutions, bodies of knowledge, disciplines, organisations and agents who may
deliver the same message across public discourse without necessarily organised
cooperation). The individualised ideal self is therefore not just articulated through
government-sanctioned psychological experts such as those working for health
services or psychological professional bodies, but also in a range of commercial
and non-commercial media that host a range of ‘‘psy’’ experts who are able to
legitimise their expertise through a variety of means. These means include, for
example, the number of followers they have on Instagram; endorsements
from celebrity clientele; qualifications or extended therapeutic experience; and
often representations of their own lives as ones of optimal living (in relation to
beauty work see, for example, McRobbie, 2015). These psy experts are essential for
self-help to exist, since they offer tools for self-development that the individual does
not already have.
Working on the self to widen capacities to act is life-enhancing. But critical
perspectives highlight how much of self-help literature directs an individual in
only limited, particular ways. As we have argued elsewhere, ‘‘The ‘freedom’ of
self-help . . . comes at a price: to understand ourselves as always already flawed,
in need of transformation, able to help ourselves but only with experts of psy
and only in the direction of an individualised, psychological self’’ (Riley et al.,
2018, p. 19). Furthermore, women are the primary objects of transformation in
contemporary self-help. An important – yet often underdeveloped – aspect of
8 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

analysis of self-help is the way that femininity is marked as a particular prob-

lematic object in need of change.

Mad women and postfeminism

The first-ever self-help book is thought to be Smiles’s (1859) Self-Help. This book
was written for men, and was intended for the aspirational man wanting to
become more reputable and prosperous.2 This early association with self-help
and masculinity is not surprising, given cultural associations between masculinity
and a rational and self-reliant self (Illouz, 2008; McGee, 2005). Yet, from Smiles’s
book onwards, self-help became a predominantly feminized genre, interested in
shaping feminine subjectivity.
There are long-standing cultural associations between femininity and psychological
pathology. These associations can be dated all the way back to Aristotelian times, and
concerns about women’s ‘‘wandering womb’’ (see Appignanesi, 2009, for an historical
analysis of the associations between insanity and femininity). These ideas are given a
modern spin in contemporary self-help literature specifically about women. While self-
help is, in general, predicated on a flawed individual, self-help aimed specifically at
women (rather than self-help with a more ‘‘gender neutral’’ tone but with the expect-
ation of a largely female audience) constructs femininity as pathological.
The normative pathology of femininity is perpetuated in media texts, for
example in the film Mean Girls (2004). While Mean Girls sees femininity as
ultimately recuperating meanness (e.g. through group therapy), such texts also
show teenage experience as defined through inherent meanness, cliques and
psychological damage produced by female pathology and/or a toxic cultural
context. Other texts, meanwhile, show the progression of this mean girl mentality,
producing mentally damaged young adults. See, for example, the analysis of the
film The Bachelorette (2012) in Riley et al. (2018), as well as the articles by Ringrose
(2006) and Gonick (2004) in the Virtual Special Issue.
The wider cultural understandings of women as more relationship-oriented
than men also position women as particularly far from the ideal individualist
self of self-help literature. One critique of self-help, therefore, is that it acts as a
disciplinary power, encouraging women to learn to be more like men (or more
specifically, to take up characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity
such as autonomy, competitiveness and aggression). Hochschild (1994), for
example, critiques the genre of self-help that celebrates women developing a
form of rugged individualism, where ideal femininity is conceptualised as not
needing others. Other scholars highlight the way that self-help aimed at women
in the workplace problematises women’s behaviour rather than organisational
cultures that support a very limited set of behavioural practices (and the neo-
liberal economies on which they are predicated) (Rottenberg, 2014). For exam-
ple, in their analysis of Prozac advertisements aimed at women in professional
employment in the USA, Blum and Stracuzzi (2004, p. 279) argue that women
are encouraged to develop a form of ‘‘muscular femininity’’ whereby they
should embody traditional femininity in the form of a highly polished feminine
Riley et al. 9

look, but combine this with psychological traits associated with hegemonic
masculinity.
An important contribution to feminist scholarship on self-help, which brings
together both the critical component identified in our first section and the
gendered analysis of self-help, is feminist analysis of postfeminism. In this work,
contemporary self-help is located within a wider ‘‘postfeminist sensibility’’, a term
introduced by Rosalind Gill (2007) to express a set of ideas articulating a form of
ideal femininity aligned with neoliberal rationality.3 According to Gill:

What marks out the present moment as distinctive . . . are three features: first, the
dramatically increased intensity of self-surveillance, indicating the intensity of
the regulation of women (alongside the disavowal of such regulations); secondly,
the extensiveness of surveillance over entirely new spheres of life and intimate
conduct; and thirdly, the focus upon the psychological – upon the requirements to
transform oneself and remodel one’s interior life. (2008, p. 441)

Echoing Rose’s analysis of neoliberal subjectivity, Gill argues that postfeminist

sensibility calls on the self to reflect and work on the self, but to understand this
work as a practice of free will, even while its transformation is towards a subject-
ivity that best fits modes of good economic citizenship. In this context, self-help
offers an important and productive space for the expression of elements of a post-
feminist sensibility, such as self-surveillance and psychological transformation.
One element of self-help that interacts with postfeminist sensibility is its focus on
forms of self-care and self-love. Women’s media have recently shifted their tone from
the ‘‘bitchiness’’ of make-over television programmes like What Not to Wear or maga-
zines that highlight female celebrities’ imperfections (McRobbie, 2009) to a more
affirmative discourse that emphasizes the ways that women need to love themselves.
But scholars of postfeminism are concerned by this apparently more positive shift
because, in a characteristic postfeminist move, these affirmative statements about
women that resonate with feminist principles (e.g. that women have intrinsic value)
are simultaneously tied to a neoliberal incitation to work on the self. This sense-
making locates the problem (e.g. of confidence) in women, rather than, for example,
in social contexts where young women find it hard to have confidence (for examples of
this critique see Banet-Weiser, 2015; Gill & Elias, 2014; Gill & Orgad, 2017, 2018).
One recent bestseller, The Goddess Revolution: Make Peace with Food, Love Your
Body and Reclaim Your Life (Wells, 2016), is a good example of the complexity of
‘‘loving yourself’’. In The Goddess Revolution, Wells, who deems herself a Certified
Health and Eating Psychology Coach, tells her readers to get rid of scales, forget fad
diets that are rule-bound, get ‘‘full of yourself’’, and learn to listen to the body and
follow the body’s own intuition about the nutrients it needs. But to achieve this, the
reader must ‘‘work out like a goddess’’, ‘‘treat self-care appointments with yourself
like important business meetings’’ and ‘‘try them [new clothes] on with your favourite
music playing!’’. The book thus marries seemingly pro-feminist sentiments of body
positivity and self-acceptance with appearance concerns (that tie women’s value back
to their bodies), the consumption of products, and a blurring of economic and
10 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

psychological language (see the earlier section on the imbrication of psychological

and market discourse). The final page of Wells’s book features links to her ‘‘Goddess
Retreats’’. The take-home message, then, is that the route to a better life for women
is through individual consumption. In Wells’s approach to feminist activism, change
is produced by working on the individual self, rather than engaging in social action
to produce changes to the social structure.
Postfeminist ‘‘love yourself’’ discourses exhort women to change the way they
think about themselves, creating the expectation that women should not only
engage in body work, but also work on the mind in order to improve ‘‘self-
esteem’’ and ‘‘confidence’’. This is encapsulated in the much-repeated self-help
mantra that for someone else to love you, you must love yourself first (see,
for example, I Heart Me: The Science of Self-Love [Hamilton, 2015]). But, in
proposing that what is really wrong with women is a problem of confidence,
such texts ‘‘rely upon and reinforce the cultural intelligibility of the female body
as inherently ‘difficult to love’’’ (Gill & Elias, 2014, p. 184).
Gill and colleagues have also argued that contemporary calls to be more resilient
are, like those of self-actualisation discussed above, actually new forms of regula-
tion. Their work comes from analysis of a range of media texts that call on (par-
ticularly middle-class) women to be resilient, use positive thinking, and ‘‘bounce
back’’ (Gill & Orgad, 2018). In the context of austerity and growing social inequal-
ities, the authors argue that this psychological focus directs attention away from
social critique and delegitimises demands for social transformation (Barker, Gill, &
Harvey, 2018).
Postfeminist scholarship also points to the importance of complexity in the
gendered landscape in which contemporary self-help operates. Postfeminist sens-
ibility is characterised by complexity, contradiction and confusion – meaning that
however much work they put into themselves, women can never be confident that
they have got it right (Riley et al., 2018). Working on the self might, for example,
represent vanity or emotional insecurity, not good subjectivity, yet to not work on
the self risks being understood as a failed subject. Such complexity and contradic-
tion are confusing, creating anxieties and attendant hopes to find expert advice
offering a successful route through this complexity, thus fuelling the market for
self-help literature.4 But, our analysis points to seeking such self-help as a form of
what Berlant (2011) calls ‘‘cruel optimism’’ as it offers ‘‘the promise of health and
happiness through practices that might make feeling healthy and happy less likely
to happen’’ (Riley et al., 2018, p. 162).

Just do it! Contributions made in Feminism & Psychology

Analysis of self-help literature highlights a reoccurring trope of highly individua-
lised subjects who work on themselves at the exclusion of the social with a view to
moving away from a flawed self and towards optimal living. Yet the expectation for
optimal living makes living ‘‘normally’’ – with its associations of perfection and
self-mastery – increasingly difficult to achieve (Blackman, 2004; De Vos, 2015;
Illouz, 2008; Riley et al., 2018).
Riley et al. 11

The dynamics of the self-help industry, the continued dominance of neoliberal

economies and associated ideal subjectivities that tie work on the self to good
citizenship, and a postfeminist gendered landscape that requires women to work
on themselves in ever more intense and complex ways while understanding this
work as empowering – all point to the importance of feminist scholarship on self-
help. It is thus timely to review the work published in Feminism & Psychology,
showcasing the contributions made and considering fruitful directions for future
research. This Virtual Special Issue is therefore aimed not only at researchers but
also at those teaching in a range of programmes and their students. In particular,
feminist scholarship on self-help may be a useful vehicle to develop critical thinking
in psychology and counselling students in their development as psy-experts.
In this issue, we bring together 10 articles on self-help published in Feminism &
Psychology. These were identified through searches that included the term ‘‘self-help’’,
and when few articles were initially identified, a systematic search of all past Feminism
& Psychology issues. That so few articles on self-help have so far been published in
Feminism & Psychology is noteworthy, given that women are so often those who are
addressed in self-help and are more likely to buy and read self-help materials
(Hochschild, 1994; Simonds, 1992). What has been published in Feminism &
Psychology, however, points to important foci for feminist scholarship: articles that
conceptualise self-help in political terms and seek to develop theory on this subject;
articles that critique the way that women’s psychology is represented as inherently
flawed or lacking; and articles that explore self-help given to women regarding how
they might look after themselves in contexts traditionally associated with women’s
concerns (e.g. pregnancy and intimate relationships) and the problems women might
face as part of the workforce. We briefly describe these articles below.
We start this Virtual Special Issue with an early contribution to scholarship on
self-help: Ellis’s (1998) critical analysis of the concept of self-esteem. She focuses on
self-esteem because she sees it being used in a range of self-help materials as evi-
dence of a psychological problem that needs intervention. But rather than offer a
tool for identifying and supporting marginalised people, Ellis argues that psycho-
logical interventions based on self-esteem further marginalise the marginalised, by
locating the problem in the person and as characteristic of a category of people.
Ellis’s examples include Maori people and women. Her paper highlights issues of
cultural insensitivity in psychometric measures and offers an important critique
that psychological interventions aimed at empowering women might disempower
them, in part by offering individual, psychologised solutions to social problems.
Writing only a few years earlier, Squire (1994) examined The Oprah Winfrey
Show – which at the time was the most watched daytime talk show in the USA –
and its claim to be empowering to women. We include Squire’s work as an example
of self-help through the medium of television. Squire examined the way that Oprah,
the African American female host, interacted with her audience, psychological
experts and people invited onto the show in ways that essentialised and psycholo-
gised problems that might otherwise have been understood as social or political
(e.g. employment). But Squire also argues that the show did not locate blame in the
individual or construct women as essentially flawed, but instead shared
12 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

marginalised narratives on prime time television in ways that aligned with feminist
values. Unlike so much of critical and feminist analysis of self-help, in this feminist
analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Squire finds that it did what it claimed to do –
empower women.
Much of the work in this issue is not, however, celebratory. The earliest engage-
ment with self-help in Feminism & Psychology was Schilling and Fuehrer’s (1993)
problematisation of the genre. In their analysis of 28 self-help books that explicitly
targeted women (for example, Smart Women, Foolish Choices), they argued that
most self-help books worked to disempower the reader through the universalised
rhetoric of victimisation and survivorhood. They also highlighted the way in which
self-help constructed women’s problems as individual and psychological in nature,
thereby obscuring structural factors and any need for institutional change.
By asking of these texts ‘‘what does getting better look like?’’ and ‘‘how are
women enjoined to achieve this?’’, Schilling and Fuehrer’s approach helped to
inform a political reading of self-help.
Building on such arguments, Day’s (2010) article brings in the important issue of
class. In drawing parallels between female ‘‘binge’’ drinkers and women who
engage in online communities centred around anorexic practices (‘‘pro-ana’’
sites), Day argued that both reflect the contradictory and complex landscape
that women negotiate in relation to self-control, morality and gender ideals.
The seemingly flawed psychology of femininity was also explored in Gonick’s
(2004) analysis of self-help and advice literature addressed to the mothers of
adolescent girls, which articulated a universal ‘‘mean girl’’ pathology that requires
work, in contrast to ‘‘masculine’’ physical aggression that is deemed normal and
unproblematic, where ‘‘boys will be boys’’ (Gonick, 2004).
The apparent universal mean girl is explored further in Ringrose’s (2006) article.
Employing a postfeminist and intersectional lens, Ringrose highlighted how repre-
sentations of feminine pathology revise feminist agendas, so that the gains made by
the feminist movement that saw women enter the public sphere are constructed as
the ones that ignite women’s and girls’ aggression, competition and underlying
cruelty in ways that particularly problematise women who are not white and
middle class.
Self-help texts that address the traditionally feminine concerns of the domestic
sphere and intimate relations can also be seen to employ a discourse of ‘‘sex dif-
ferences’’ to perform ideological work in framing women as inherently flawed and
in need of transformation. Gupta and Cacchioni’s (2013) analysis of 17 American
sex manuals shows the various ways these texts employ a medical discourse to
construct women as needing to do extra work (for example, pretending to enjoy
or want sex, or undertaking mental and physical preparation for sex because they
are ‘‘less responsive’’ than men and/or more tied to emotion). Such extra work
often requires economic capital, so that the ‘‘norms of sexual practice articulated in
these manuals can thus serve to undermine their readers, with the potential to
create a sense of failure or exclusion for those who do not have the resources
to participate or who do not see themselves represented’’ (Riley et al., 2018,
p. 82; see also Barker, Gill, & Harvey, 2018).
Riley et al. 13

Crawford’s (2004) analysis of the best-seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are
from Venus (1992) and associated spin-off reality TV program following six het-
erosexual couples putting author John Gray’s advice into action highlights the need
for analysis that engages with complexity. Crawford’s analysis highlighted how
binary differences could be used to entrench and naturalise prevailing inequalities,
but that they could also be drawn on (by the TV participants) to address issues of
inequality and hold men accountable for some of the work of managing relation-
ships. This highlights the way discourses are never entirely stable and can be
subverted and resisted, giving way to new ways of being – an important area of
investigation for feminist scholars.
Becker’s (2010) wide-ranging analysis of institutional, pop psychology and
magazine texts foreshadowed Gupta and Cacchioni (2013) in highlighting a med-
icalized discourse of stress and working mothers’ vulnerability to it. Focusing on
the traditionally masculine context of paid employment, Becker’s paper identified
several ‘‘common-sense’’ ideas produced by these texts that problematise women in
the workplace, with the conclusion that self-help for working women produces an
unresolvable ongoing individual project that masks the socio-political source of
much of women’s ‘‘stress’’.
A focus on the functions of medical discourse also formed part of Marshall and
Wollett’s (2000) critical discursive analysis of eight popular books on pregnancy.
They found that readers were exhorted to transform themselves in particular ways
that served to universalise the experience of pregnancy, obscuring the different
circumstances of women’s lives and tying one’s ‘‘fitness’’ to be a mother to a
neoliberal idea of being an enterprising consumer. An additional, medicalised
repertoire of ‘‘pregnancy as risk’’ was also identified, which worked to situate
the responsibility for ensuring health and a successful pregnancy with mothers,
ignoring the many risks that fall outside a woman’s control.
Rousseau (1993) argued that scientism often increases whenever societal changes
result in tensions in normative gender arrangements. This suggests that a useful
starting point for further investigation of self-help is how scientism and medical
discourses are used, particularly in the contemporary context in which the effects of
neoliberal austerity and far-right policies have been disproportionately felt by
women.5 Further research on how women may be positioned as inherently
flawed, particularly within a postfeminist sensibility that constructs work on the
self as empowering, is also necessary. Indeed, the articles showcased in this special
issue leave us with several important questions: What makes good self-help? How
do women reproduce, contest, re-appropriate or otherwise negotiate neoliberal and
postfeminist sensibilities of self-help, and what identities and actions are available?
Can self-help be compatible with political change? Are there links between self-help
and feminist consciousness-raising that could be better developed?
These questions point to the need for work exploring the affordances of con-
temporary self-help, and since critical textual analysis has so far dominated, it also
highlights the importance of research on first-person accounts from women who
use self-help. We also suggest useful directions offered by new materialist
approaches that decentre the human subject and reconceptualise agency in ways
14 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

that potentially offer an analytic framework for mapping the material and non-
material ramifications of self-help discourses (Van de Putte, De Schauer, Van
Hove, & Davies, 2018). Equally, Meg-John Barker’s work has broached new con-
ceptual ground with regard to self-help by recognising the benefits some people find
in developing reflexive skills and new ways of evaluating their lives, but in ways
that expose power dynamics and develop a critical approach to gender, class and
relationships that does not locate the ‘‘problem’’ at an individual level (Barker,
2013; Barker & Hancock, 2017). This creative, critical approach to developing new
ideas about what self-help is and what it can do offers a productive area for future
scholarship in Feminism & Psychology.

Acknowledgements
With thanks to Jeanne Marecek for suggesting this endeavour, and to Jeanne Marecek and
Rose Capdevila for advice on how to develop the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Sarah Riley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6712-6976
Emma Anderson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8909-3335

Notes
1. An exact figure is notoriously difficult to give, as what constitutes ‘‘self-help’’ is vague
and ever-changing. However, commonly cited figures put it at between $11 and $12 billion
a year in the US alone (Groskop, 2013; Vanderkam, 2012).
2. It’s important to recognize, though, the way that manuals and guides to being ‘‘ladylike’’
or managing the household were popular before Smiles’s (1859) Self-Help (see Gregg,
2018, for an overview).
3. See Gill (2017) and Riley, Evans, Rice, Elliot, and Marecek (2017) for a review of how
these ideas have been subsequently used.
4. For a discussion of these issues in relation to wider issues of power, see https://thecon-
versation.com/what-putins-policies-teach-us-about-post-feminist-power-93824
5. See https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/EOM_GB_16Nov2018.pdf

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Author Biographies
Sarah Riley is a Reader in Critical Psychology, exploring the psychological impact
of neoliberalism, addressing questions of gender, embodiment, health, youth
culture and citizenship. Her co-authored books include Critical Bodies (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), Doing Your Qualitative Research Project (SAGE, 2012),
18 Feminism & Psychology 29(1)

Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University

Press, 2014), and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).

Adrienne Evans is a Reader in Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at

Coventry University, UK. Past research explored sexiness; current work develops
accounts of postdigital culture, postfeminist masculinity and healthism. Her co-
authored books include Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer
Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Postfeminism and Health
(Routledge, 2018).

Emma Anderson is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Brighton. As an

emerging researcher in the field of critical social and community psychology, she uses
a discursive approach to explore areas such as welfare rights, health, wellbeing and
citizenship. Her PhD investigates constructions of happiness and selfhood, both in
‘‘expert’’ texts (popular psychology and self-help books) and in everyday talk.

Martine Robson is a Lecturer in Psychology. Her work focuses on how people in

long-term relationships negotiate individualistic, neoliberal lifestyle advice, and
uses poststructuralist theory to examine the ways in which people adopt, resist
and transform dominant health discourses. She co-authored Postfeminism and
Health (Routledge, 2018) and has published on developing Deleuzian frameworks
for health promotion.

Appendix
Becker, D. (2010). Women’s work and the societal discourse of stress. Feminism &
Psychology, 20(1), 36–52.
Crawford, M. (2004). Mars and Venus collide: A discursive analysis of marital self-help
psychology. Feminism & Psychology, 14(1), 63–79.
Day, K. (2010) Pro-anorexia and ‘binge-drinking’: Conformity to damaging ideals or ‘new’,
resistant femininities? Feminism and Psychology, 20(2): 242–248.
Ellis, S. J. (1998). Is self-esteem political? Feminism & Psychology, 8(2), 251–256.
Gonick, M. (2004). The mean girl crisis: Problematizing representations of girls’ friendships.
Feminism & Psychology, 14(3), 395–400.
Gupta, K. & Cacchioni, T. (2013) Sexual improvement as if your health depends on it: An
analysis of contemporary sex manuals. Feminism & Psychology, 23(4), 442–458.
Marshall, H. & Wollett, A. (2000). Fit to reproduce? The regulative role of pregnancy texts.
Feminism & Psychology, 10(3), 351–366.
Ringrose, J. (2006) A new universal mean girl: Examining the discursive construction and
social regulation of a new feminine pathology. Feminism and Psychology, 16(4): 405–424.
Schilling , K., & Fuehrer, A. (1993). The politics of women’s self-help books. Feminism &
Psychology, 3(3), 418–422.
Squire, C. (1994). Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show. Feminism & Psychology,
4(1), 63–79.